During a recent podcast with the VP Head of Design at SAP, Janaki Kumar, she discussed the benefit of using games to build engagement amongst workshop participants. Following on from this, we wanted to hear from you. What games had you played, or use, and why are they great?
We ran a competition and chose our favorite submissions. Below are the games that won and we thank all of you who sent in game ideas. You are a playful lot!
By 2017, app downloads are set to reach 270 billion worldwide. So it’s fair to say that the app marketplace is pretty crowded. Any app that gives users a less than 5 star user experience is doomed to failure.
And yet despite this cut-throat environment, some apps still hit the marketplace riddled with usability issues thanks to sub-par user testing. In fact, according to a report by Perfecto Mobile, 44% of app errors are found not by testers but by users after the app is launched. It’s not only unfair to make the unsuspecting user act as a usability test guinea pig, it’s also bad business: shoddy app usability leads to abandonment, loss of investment and time wasted.
It’s not only the little guy app developers who fail foul of bad usability; even the big guys can get caught out. Take Google Wave, which launched with a hugely complex feature set and commensurately low usability levels, and predictably flopped. That’s not to say that Google didn’t run usability tests on the Google Wave app before launch – of course they did. But it’s possible they didn’t run them adequately.
This article is a guest post by Tim Brown, a web designer from Minneapolis.
User Experience (UX) is such an interesting subject because it’s really just the study of humans, and our ways of interacting with things. It calls us to pay attention to the perspective of those around us – it helps us take into consideration the habits and tendencies of others to really make something that’s easy to use and pleasant.
I was in community college for Web Design and Interactive media when I first heard about User Experience. It was really a bit mysterious to me for a couple months until I dug into it – toured a local agency that was hiring interns for UX, and read a couple amazing books on the subject: Steven Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” and “Lean UX” by Jeff Gothelf.
I got excited and started chatting with other people in my class that wanted to get into the internship – so we started a project together, got a real client, and even got her to pay for coffee shop gift cards used to bribe people to do user experience testing with us on her chiropractic website.
(more…)
At Loop11 we’ve long been a tool that our clients go to when they need to run dozens, or even hundreds, of participants through their user tests. They then use our reporting suite to extract insights which feed back into their design process.
Many clients have used Loop11 in conjunction with other qualitative tools which provided videos of a participant’s session but there was always a certain disconnect between the two data sets.
Today we are excited to announce the launch of Loop11 Videos (Beta). Now, when you run a project within Loop11 your results will also include user videos*. For the first time you will now be able to see not only the what but also the why all from within the one tool.
The introduction of Loop11 Videos means you will no longer be spending hours watching irrelevant videos and can now go straight to the user footage containing the insights you need.
Best yet, why spend thousands of dollars on your user testing, getting limited data from only a few participants, when with Loop11 for only $199 per month you can run hundreds of users through an unlimited number of usability tests!
Sign-up today for 3 free user tests on our 14 day trial.
Toby
CEO, Loop11
* Videos will only be recorded for projects using the Loop11 JavaScript.
If you design digital products like websites or apps then you will be well aware of the powerhouse prototyping tool InVision. They’ve been taking the design world by storm since founded in 2011.
Designing prototypes is an important part of any designer’s workflow, as such, InVision has become an integral tool within product teams. However, designing the prototype is only half the job, the second part is testing the design with users and seeing if what you’ve designed works.
Like a number of prototyping tools on the market, InVision has some usability testing baked in. It predominantly revolves around getting videos of users while they test a prototype on their iPhone 6 or above.
These videos of course are valuable, however, there is so much more that can be done with user testing and for these situations a tool like Loop11 is perfect.
The good news is, using Loop11 to test your InVision prototypes couldn’t be easier. Below we detail the steps.
Justinmind, a fantastic prototyping tool for websites and apps, has just released a new integration with Loop11 which makes testing your design a breeze.
Below we lay out the simple steps. In order to follow this tutorial, you will need both a Justinmind account and a Loop11 account. Both offer free trials. (more…)
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is one of the world’s leading independent organisations for medical humanitarian aid. Every year nearly two hundred Australians and New Zealanders are sent to and supported in the field by Médecins Sans Frontières Australia.
In late 2015 MSF ran a Loop11 study on http://www.msf.org.au/ to collate visitor feedback and form benchmarks on their existing website to guide development of a new website. Their test was comprised of 7 tasks and 20 questions.
Sean from MSF describes; “Our approach was to gather evidence from a number of sources (internal survey, Google Analytics, and usability testing) that would help identify problem areas that would need to be addressed in our future website, and also opportunities for improved engagement with our key target audiences. Our hope was that by fixing any usability issues, and improving our information architecture and content strategy, we could achieve our objectives of recruitment, fundraising, awareness-raising and advocacy more effectively.”
Axure is one of the best prototyping tools available and as such it is one of the most popular tools used in conjunction with Loop11. Many of Loop11’s users, companies of all sizes, create their prototypes in Axure and then run multiple tests to validate which of their designs perform the best. You can find a case study on prototyping with Axure and Loop11 here.
To make the workflow as seamless as possible we wanted to create this ‘how to’ article to show the exact steps that need to be followed in order to get the best results from using the two tools together. (more…)
